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Love & Lies is billed as a companion to Wittlinger's Hard Love, a YA novel with zine publishers as its main characters. Sadly this installment doesn't involve zines--and weirdly none of the characters seem to be vegetarian, much less vegan--but it is still a compelling read.

author gender:

I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian. Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply that I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian--femme, masochist, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed. "A Question of Class." p. 23

I'd recognized in her face the same look I'd been seeing in other women's faces for all the months since the Barnard Conference on Sexuality (which my friends and I referred to as the Barnard Sex Scandal)--a look of fascination, contempt, and extreme discomfort. "Public Silence, Private Terror." p. 101-02

What will they think twenty years from now of the oral histories of the passing women on file at the Lesbian Herstory Archives? There's no doubt in my mind that the oral histories of working-class dykes and passing women will get far less serious consideration than those of famous artists and rich eccentrics. "A Personal History of Lesbian Porn." p.191 (a blog post of mine that touches on this)

First of all I love that Allison published this 1994 collection of essays with Firebrand Books, a feminist and lesbian press, rather than a large publisher, which surely she could have, based on the success of Bastard out of Carolina, published by Dutton in 1992. Instead of using her success, even to have a better platform for her message to advance her career, she used it to advance her community, to give back to the press that gave her a platform in the first place, with her first book, Trash. (A chapbook of poetry preceded Trash.)

free:

...I asked the woman who worked there about the music she was playing. She said it was "women's music"--music by, for, and about lesbians--and played me a couple of songs from the most popular records. I didn't like anything. I kept waiting for it to start. It wasn't punk, and I was depressed about my chances of ever achieving real lesbian consciousness. Finally, I bought a Holly Near record just to stop feeling stupid.

There were T-shirts on the wall behind the desk, like a Dykes on Bikes shirt which, I swear, almost weep right there in the store. At the last minute, I asked the woman to throw in a purple Fesbian-Leminist T-shirt. I clutched the paper bag between my knees on the motorcycle seat in front of me.

I put on my T-shirt when I got home and wandered around the apartment listening to Holly Near. Todd wasn't there, and I turned it way up, hoping to make it sound better. I played it at 78rpm and tried to pogo to it. It just didn't work. p. 33-34

The book starts out with Melany, a seventeen-year-old punk sleeping with a woman for the first time. You travel with her as she overcomes her shyness about her sexuality, her trying to reconcile punk with the hippie and new age lesbian scene, getting dumped, sleeping with her roommate, doing civil disobedience in an ACT UP era protest, and finally falling in love with the right person.